What a bizarre take. The EU council is backing down - they do want chat control but each time they propose it they meet resistance and back down. Then they come back again and try again.

To suggest the public reaction is overblown and media manipulation is bizarre. This is the 3rd or 4th time the EU has attempted to get this through. Just because they chickened out of a vote doesn’t mean the politicians don’t want this.

In a democracy votes happen. In the EU they keep resurrecting this terrible idea hoping to get it through but then backing away if they don’t think they can win. They know if there was an actual vote it likely would put an end to his.

Also the EU council is the antithesis of a democracy. It is not directly elected - instead it’s a club of the heads of states of all the countries in the EU. It just represents who happens to be in charge of each country, and gives equal weights to all those countries regardless of their population size. The EU has a Parliament but it’s a fig leaf of democracy as so much power is held in bodies like the Council and the Commission (which is 1 post per state and horse traded not elected).

So please don’t make this out as a sign that EU democracy works. If EI democracy was working properly they would have listened the first time, and they’d have moved to a directly elected system for the executive Council and commission years ago.

The EU gets too much of a free pass for “not being America” but it’s got huge problems that need fixing to make it an actual democracy.

I’ve not seen Euphoria, but drugs, drinking and sex plus underage clubbing were all things that happened at my schools between 15-18.

A drama like Euphoria is of course going to be way over the top regardless of setting.

I do agree casting 25year olds (zendaya is 29 years old) feels bizarre but that is what American TV has always done. Presumably it’s to do with experience given these are expensive shows that need to work to strict production schedules given how expensive these shows are. Its understandable they’d want a cast who have been proven to be reliable and experienced, and also are not restricted in the hours they can work. Also age consistency matrers - once you have one 25 year old cast member all of them need to be the same age or it looks disturbing with a mixed age cast set in a high school.

I suppose profile may matter too - Zendaya was already famous; the pool.of famous 18 year old actors is smaller than the pool of 25 year old actors. Certainly regardless of fame the pool of 18 year old actors with a big CV is going to be small. It’s risky to cast an unproven 17 year old but less risky to cast a 25 year old who has done plays, and maybe TV or movies, or completed acting training.

I agree they could just not set it in a high school but then the specific dynamics and stories they want to tell would not be available. High school is a strange time - in the US but also globally - where people are on the cusp of adulthood (16 in many places, 18 in the US), yet totally restricted by the law, family and school. It’s a perfect setting for conflict, which makes drama, and it is universally relatable as almost everyone went to school.

Meanwhile if you set something 19-25, it is no longer universal. About 50-60% of people in rich countries go to university / college. And those institutions massively vary from community colleagues, poorer universities, up to elite places. Meanwhile 40-50% do other things.

So yeah, I get that it feels bizarre that shows set in high schools are all 25 year old actors but I think it makes sense why, and setting things in high schools make sense too. These shows obviously make money and have a wide audience, even if it’s not really my personal taste.

Trying to rewrite history huh - they suspended the show because Kimmel criticised Trump, and the FCC threatened ABC/DIsney. Never forget.

Yeah absolutely, these things are cyclical! Hold on to those cabbage patch kids.

Sorry this isn’t very clear. You’re saying who is a what now?

There is nothing wrong with that PC but there is an opportunity cost to be aware of - upgrades.

A PC like that is static - you pay £600 and you get the PC, but after a few years if you’ve out grown it then you need to get a whole other PC. It’s the same with laptops.

However if you spend the £600 on a case, a motherboard, a cpu with a gpu, ram and storage you have a full starter PC. You can even save money by not paying for windows (built into the price of the mini PC) and get Linux for free. PCs are modular and any component can be upgraded and switched out at any time later.

So in a couple of years you may decide the PC is slowing down, or you’re out growing it, and you can swap in some more RAM or upgrade the CPU. Or you decide you can afford a dedicated graphics card, you can just buy the card and slot it in, and every £ goes into getting a great graphics card instead of starting again from scratch

Think of it like this: if you buy an all in one device you might spend £600 now and say another £600 in 3-5 years if you need to upgrade and fully replace it, and probably are still very limited in what you can get. A replacement will still have integrated graphics and still be behind cutting edge games, and just be a newer version of the same problem you have now. But with a full PC build you might spend £600 now for an OK PC and in 3-5years time you pay £600 just to add a great graphics card and have something way better than any mini PC. Or you spend £400 now and £200 in 2 years and £100 in 3 years and £500 in 4 years and gradually keep the PC how you want it without having to start from scratch. You end up with a decent PC now and gradually something powerful but without the upfront cost and without “wasting” money having to get a new device with a new motherboard, new cpu, new power supply, new RAM every time.You want an uplift .

It’s a crude example but the point is a full size PC can be expanded and switched up continously, and you can adapt it, and likely get something far better for the same money long term, while a fixed spec all-in-one device can serve a purpose for now but then needs total replacement when you outgrow it.

Building a full PC from scratch is easy - genuinely it’s plug and play, and only takes a bit of basic research to see what components are best to buy. There are loads of tutorials on how to put it together. Meanwhile your money goes much further over the longer term as you’re not having to buy a whole new PC everytime you need/want an upgrade - you can instead focus your money on the bits that need to change.

Even if you get a prebuilt tower PC now (ATX or Mini ATX) your money will go further AND you have something that you can upgrade and adapt. Although I think building from scratch is the best option as prebuilt Pcs are a false economy - they save money with cheaper components and you pay for labour on the build, when you can build it yourself for free and put every £ into better components.

Don’t be intimidated by building a PC - it’s nowhere near as difficult as it seems, and is an easy to obtain skill but worth learning as it’ll save you money, and allow you to fix and problem solve if you ever have problems in the future.

If.you have a PC now - even if it’s a pre build from a manufacturer - you can very likely open it up and start upgrading it now, and your money can go much further.

This version of the article misses important information from the original source Trend Force who issued a report on DDR4 prices which news sites have been quoting.

In addition to the supply constraints mentioned, the original report also cited Trump’s tarrifs which alongside the manufacturing supply slump could cause panic buying in the US specifically. This is speculation but based on the possibility Trump could “issue new tariffs or restrictions related to production capacity against China. This, in turn, may trigger another round of panic buying,”

The original report was posted to twitter with “Tarriff fears may trigger further panic buying”

It’s odd to talk about panic buying and not explain where that has come from. Also odd not to mention Trump’s tariffs when that was a key part of the original report in June.

The absolute basics:

1. Install qbittorrent
2. Install a VPN and run it so that all your Internet traffic goes down it
3. Open a Web browser and search for top torrent sites 2025. There are articles with lists of the big ones.
4. Go to a torrent site and search for what you want.
5. Download the .torrent file and open it in qbittorrent OR copy the magnet link and paste that into qbit torrent. Either will start your download.

Always use the VPN when searching and downloading.

There are lots of steps to make it more convenient - things like using a Virutal machine so the vpn and torrent do their thing while you do whatever else you want on your PC, or setting up a docker Servarr stack to make things more convenient, or setting up a Raspberry pi / other device as a servarr stack. But for the basics all you need is a torrent client, a VPN and a Web browser.

All the extra advanced stuff is just quality of life, like being able to leave it downloading securely 24hours a day or organising your downloads better.

I hope he wore a face mask during that brown nosing, or is face will be smeared in Trump faeces and fake tan.

Personally I’d be pissed off to be honest. It’s none of his business and this is crossing boundaries.

Being set up with random women you’ve never met and he himself likely barely knows is very unlikely to be successful. He’s also aggressive and rude about it. Why is he so angry you’re single?

This isn’t about the random date, this is about the way your dad treats you. You’re 22, not a child, it’s none of his business. How you react to this determines how he behaves in the future - if you don’t want him doing this again you need to tell him where to go.

Yeah the Act shows the wilful stupidity of politicians who pass legislation without understanding the areas they’re legislating on. It’s a nonsense act that tries to look like it is “protecting children” and is performative nonsense for MPs to pass moral judgement on things they don’t agree with.

But in practice it’s a security and privacy nightmare, it’s restricting and interfering in the freedom and rights of the majority of the population all to satisfy a stupid moral panic, and it makes the UK look like a backwards state.

A lot of it comes down to convention and convention is often set by those who did it first or whose work dominated a field. The whole mathematical notation system we use today is just a convention and is not the only one that exists, but is the one the world has decided to standardise to…

Rene Descartes is usually regarded at he originator of the current system. He used abc for constants and xyz for unknown variables amongst other conventions.

Sequential letter sets are easy to use as they are easily recognised, and convenient as a result, plus are generally accepted to have non specific or less specific meaning. For example:

a²+b²=c²

That formula is a much simpler concept to get round using sequential leffer than:

V² + G² = z²

Under the common system, when you don’t use sequential letters it also implies much more specific meaning to the individual letters, and that can introduce ambiguity and confusion.

When writing a proof there can be many many statements made and you’d quickly run out of letters if you didn’t have a convention for accepting abc are variables and can be reused.

We also do use symbols from other alphabet sets, and alpha/beta/gamma is commonly used trio. But in mathematical notation there are a huge range of defined constants and symbols now that many have been ascribed specific uses. Pi for example. So you risk bringing in ambiguity of meaning by moving away from the accepted conventions of current maths by using other sets.

Even e has specific meaning and can be ambiguous if you need to stretch to 5 variables. When working with e it’s not uncommon to use a different string of lwtters in the latin alphabet to avoid confusion if you need to use variables

And we don’t stop at 3; abcd etc is used.

This is a combination of terrible legislation in the UK meets awful social media site.

The Online Safety Act is an abomination, compromising the privacy and freedom of the vast majority of the UK in the name of “protecting children”.

I’m of the view parents are responsible for protecting their children. I know it’s hard but the Online Safety Act is not a solution.

All it will.do is compromise the privacy and security of law abiding adults while kids will still access porn and all the other really bad stuff on the Internet will actually be unaffected. The dark illegal shit on the Internet is not happening on Pornhub or Reddit.

The UK is gradually sliding further and further into censorship, and authoritarianism and all the in the name of do gooders. It’s scary to watch.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but wouldn’t diffuse light be what it’s going to be best at? While it’d be worse on a sunny day when there is an optimal single direction for the light to come in?

It’s the opposite of a light house fresnel lens - instead of scattering the light source evenly out, it’ll capture diffuse incoming rays from random directions better and concentrate it on the photovoltaic cell? However it would be at the cost of being able to capture direct sunlight efficiently as only some of the lens would ever be in the best position to capture the direct rays?

That link is for Piefed.world; run by the same team that run Lemmy.world

There are other piefed servers which may have different email requirements. But the most likely reason Piefed.world requires real emails is to prevent bots making fake accounts and also reduce the risk of bad actors making numerous accounts to avoid bans. As it’s hard to get multiple real emails it makes it hard to make multiple anonymous accounts which is unfortunately a tactic of trolls.

You can of course create a dedicated “private” email account on an official service and use that to sign up if you’re worried about sharing your primary email account. A lot of people do this online to have a legitimate email but essentially in it’s own silo separate from other personal emails.

Yeah all you have to do is circumvent the security settings in your browser and suppress warning messages to enable Manifest 2, all in 8 easy steps (written as if it’s 6 steps to make it seem less onerous). For now. Until Google switches it off completely.

Or, drop Chrome and Chromium based browsers (such as Edge, Vivaldi, Brave etc) in one easy step. Install a privacy respecting Firefox based browser like Firefox itself or Librewolf.

And yet we’ve had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.

We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.

Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a “success” for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.

Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.

It’s very difficult to get explosives and it’s very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.

Yeah… Except he makes the “freak kid” live under the stairs and neglects him compared to his own son. Kinda hard to redeem the guy by him being otherwise average.

I’ve never had toilet paper like that. I buy supermarket own brand stuff here in the UK. Even when I’ve bought cheap stuff I’ve not had that issue.

Switch to a different brand. The paper they’re using is bad of it’s flaking off all the time.

Yeah the urinary bladder doesn’t just stop working and burst. There will have been an underlying cause, but it was not picked up at the time so now all we have is a garbled version of how he died.

People can go into acute urinary retention - where they are unable to pass urine. That can be extremely painful and it can lead to rupture if it’s totally untreated.

But it doesn’t just happen - and choosing not to go to the toilet is not going to cause it. Underlying causes might be prostate enlargement (common), a kidney stone getting trapped in the urethra or bladder neck, or cancers of the prostate, bladder or bowel, amongst others.

In the modern era urinary retention is easily diagnosed with an ultrasound and usually a CT to assess for causes. Urinary catheterisation can be performed either through the urethra or a suprapubic catheter through the skin to bypass the blockage.

None of that was available when he was alive - he’d just have been in extreme agony and there was little anyone would know to do. When he died they might have done an autopsy and found the burst bladder but workinf out what happened would be difficult and depend on the skill and knowledge of the person who did the autopsy.

So it’s extremely unlikely he died because he didn’t go to the toilet during a banquet. Something else happened that precipitated his urinary retention and eventual bladder perforation.

Once the bladder perforated he was a dead man as there was nothing they could do to repair the bladder or clean out the abdomen in that period. He’d have rapidly become more ill and died from infection and organ failure.